Kobby Mensah’s Appointment Is Just Another Kwabena Donkor Fluke Awaiting an Epic Bust

Neither the news report announcing his appointment nor the general quality of his political commentaries and, for the most part, his scandalous and cynical free-ranging and morally and civically rudderless animadverting of the recently outgone Akufo-Addo-led government of the twice, consecutively elected New Patriotic Party (NPP), demonstrated any worthwhile flair of visionary competence and administrative or managerial acumen of Prof. Kobby Mensah, of the University of Ghana’s Business School (UGBS), as amounting to any proven qualities that qualify the latter as an ideal or a viable candidate for the cranially taxing portfolio of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Ghana Tourism Development Company Limited (GTDCL) by President John “Ahmed Bola Tinubu” Dramani Mahama (See “Prof. Kobby Mensah appointed CEO of Ghana Tourism Development Company ” Modernghana.com 1/30/25).

Which was why I could only perfectly and unreservedly agree with a fellow pundit of Ghana’s Fourth Republican Political Culture’s contention that it disturbingly well appears that the most salient and/or significant qualification that anyone needs in order to be bumped up into any of our lucrative State-Capturing non-ministerial executive portfolios, is for one to have made oneself remarkably unpopular or infamous and notorious enough as a trash-talking Akufo-Addo-bashing critic.

On the foregoing count, the one most remarkable hallmark of Prof. Kobby Mensah has to do with him having achieved a meteoric notoriety as a loudmouth Ivory Tower denizen who has absolutely no intellectually progressive and morally upright or righteous clue about the historically unprecedented Akufo-Addo-implemented Universally Fee-Free Senior High, Technical, Vocational and STEM Education System, a destiny-changing social-intervention program which the so-called expert in political marketing - whatever the latter label means or may really be worth in practice - once described as a peevish and a patently pedestrian national development initiative that practically added absolutely nothing worthwhile to the quality and the living standard of the proverbial average Ghanaian citizen, and whose very implementation the then-President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo deserved absolutely no credit or gratitude except outright contempt by the Ghanaian citizenry, since the fiscal resources expended in implementing the Universally Fee-Free SHS System had not come from the personal bank account of the legendary architect of the landmark Repeal of the Criminal Libel Law.

It obviously did not matter in the least bit to Prof. Kobby Mensah that his present paymaster, or soon-to-be paymaster, had publicly and vehemently contended that the practical possibility of the implementation of a Universally Fee-Free SHS-TV Education System existed only in the hallucinogenic imagination of a desperate megalomaniac. Then also, as to why if it was that easy Nana Akufo-Addo’s immediate predecessor and, now, immediate successor had not implemented the same, let alone be able to competently manage the John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-established National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), which Mr. Mahama had royally bungled and promptly scapegoated Mr. Sylvester Mensah for criminal embezzlement. But guess what, Dear Reader? Recently, a newly reelected President Mahama generously rewarded the criminally indicted and “house-arrested” Mr. Mensah with the even more fiscally taxing portfolio of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Ghana Export and Import Bank.

Which, of course, can only make any civically responsible and critically thinking Ghanaian citizen wonder what he was actually thinking about, when President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama decided to handpick a man who has more than amply demonstrated that he has absolutely no morally and socioeconomically redeeming achievements to his name and academic title, besides merely being associated with the University of Ghana’s Business School, where he was promoted to Associate Professor just a handful of years ago and over which he had made an oceanic wave of a social media splash, with a decibel level of intensity that was much higher than his chum-change of personal and professional achievements.

The man obviously lacks the sort of intellectual gravitas and managerial expertise required for the job of CEO of the Ghana Tourism Development Company Limited. Which pretty much reminded Yours Truly of President Mahama’s equally hairbrained cocktailing and custom-tailoring of a fiscally wasteful portfolio called the Power Ministry for a conjugal relative by the name of Dr. Kwame Donkor, a British-trained specialist in Business Management, with the sole and the express objective of resolving the seemingly intractable canker of Dumsor, that is, the perennially erratic supply of electricity in the country, in the runup to the 2016 General Election, within the temporal space of one year or twelve months, to be exact.

Dr. Kwabena Donkor would, just like the rest of his nauseatingly familiar ilks of blowhard braggadocios, end up becoming just another criminal waste of the precious time and the fiscal resources of Ghanaian taxpayers. But, you see, Dear Reader, the real problem here was not because Dr. Kwabena Donkor was a clueless blowhard pretender who was woefully unqualified for the job. Rather, the buck, as it were, squarely rested smack on the desk of Jubilee House’s Presidential Suite of a man who was even far more clueless than a genuinely eager and desperate, albeit grossly and decidedly incompetent, Dr. Kwabena Donkor who, by the way, ought to have conducted at least a passable and/or a cursory amount or level of due diligence vis-a-vis the real or true professional qualifications and the competence of his relative. Then again, who said crass nepotism has any regard or respect for due diligence?

And such due diligence could have entailed the very simple and soft-brained demand by the prospective employer, in this instance, “Ghana’s President Tinubu,” for the submission of a proposal systematically detailing the precise processes by which Dr. Kwabena Donkor demonstrably intended to solve the problem of Dumsor within the temporal space of a year or twelve months.

Thus far, absolutely nothing that Yours Truly has read about the man suggests or indicates that, indeed, Prof. Kobby Mensah has any remarkable or administratively worthwhile experience about how to radically and profitably reform and develop Ghana’s humongous and protean and, for the most part, inchoate tourism industry, besides the fact of the candidate’s claiming to be adept at some aspects, largely cybernetical, of Business Marketing and Political Propaganda when, in fact, what Ghana presently direly needs is an experienced entrepreneur with remarkable success and creative initiative on how to both build and develop the country’s tourism industry, and who can easily, by the flip of a pesewa or a coin toss, be able to put into place a viable team of multitalented and multifaceted tourism development experts, and not a mere political theorist and quarter-baked intellectual demagogue inordinately given to trash talking, much less a scholar who clearly does not seem to have significantly distinguished himself within even his own discipline of purported expertise.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
January 5, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]